New design and construction of hightemperature tribology testingequipment : in the context of hard coatings

Abstract: There are two main goals of this thesis. Firstly, to improve and develop an existing hot weartester at Karlstad University so that it may test more samples of different sizes. Secondly, totest previously impossible samples and investigate their tribological properties and measurethe coefficient of friction with high reproducibility. The development work on the tribometer wasdone by a prestudy including; Investigating the hot wear tester, idea generation in CAD andcollecting information from the creator and prior users of it. After a few rounds of conceptgeneration and discussion with the supervisor and workshop staff, a new sample holder withdifferent sample adapters was created. Five tests of four different materials were conductedand their friction was measured. The new sample holder was able to solve the mainconcerns with the old design and showed great promise in producing reproducible results,better than any previous versions. The friction of the different TiAlN samples, at roomtemperature, seemed to indicate that there is a certain amount of Al% that maximizes frictionand that there is no simple linear relationship between Al% and coefficient of friction. Finallyit can be concluded that the initial goals of the thesis have been met, and that a newscientific instrument has been created to aid in the further understanding of tribology.